Civilization Remapped in Chikamatsu Monzaemon's The Later Battles of Coxinga

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Abstract This essay focuses on the early eighteenth-century Japanese puppet play, The Later Battles of Coxinga: a sequel to Chikamatsu Monzaemon's 近松門左衛門 (1653–1725) historical epoch that, like its predecessor, is based tenuously on the Manchu invasion of China and the efforts by the Japanese-born warrior Zheng Chenggong 鄭成功 (1624–1661) (aka Coxinga) to restore the Ming. Whereas in the original play Coxinga was a valiant and proactive participant in the quest to return the world to a Sinocentric normal, in The Later Battles, he identifies much less ambiguously with Japan, the land of his birth, and ultimately chooses to leave China altogether to establish a new regime on the island of Taiwan. Although clearly a work of fiction with little interest in a geographically or ethnographically accurate portrayal of continental Asia, the play nevertheless partakes in a larger redefinition of Japan's relation to “proximate Others” on the fringes of the Chinese world order. In particular, the regions of Manchuria and Taiwan, areas either denigrated or entirely ignored in the original play, assume central significance in The Later Battles as sites where hierarchies between centers and frontiers might be restructured and reversed and act as catalysts for the creative reimagination of a multipolar world order that alternately engages and challenges the worldview posited in other spheres of Edo-period cultural production.

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